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Monday, December 28, 2015

Interview Today

I hope you're having a very nice holiday, and sorry if you are having to work today. I have an interview with High Country News, which is sort of the magazine of the Rocky Mountain region.

I used to live there, of course, when I lived in Boulder Colorado for eight years. What an amazing town. It was like a sci fi landscape, that Front Range seemingly stretching into infinity from the side of the Flatiron mountain that's part of of Chautauqua park.

If you look at maps of social mobility in the states, you'll see that this region, from the North to the South, is where the greatest mobility is. It's funny. It's like what Wordsworth says about being in the mountains in Cumberland, that they inspire some kind of equality between people.

I've thought about this a bit. I think the physical exertion of moving up and down at that altitude (3000m) puts people back in their body, and when you encounter someone struggling up or down, your first thought is not how different you are from them, but how you are both in this physical realm. A realm of great obstacles and incredible aesthetic experiences. Maybe Eliot's character was right: “In the mountains, there you feel free.” It's a cliche but there is something in it.

At first I felt like Mr. Clean from Apocalypse Now: I'd grown up in south London and “the light and space of [the Rockies/Vietnam] really put the zap on [my/his] head.” The light is so strong up there you feel like you can see around objects.

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I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

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Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Nothing (2015), This Huge Sunlit Abyss from the Future Right There Next to You (with Björk, 2015), Hyperobjects (2013), Realist Magic (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), nine other books and 160+ essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture and design. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci